Tetris
is one of the few games that achieves ultimate
popularity. It is remarkably simple, yet remarkably
difficult. It's been ported to every computer and game
console known to man, and has sold millions of
cartridges, tapes, and disks across the land.

Besides that, it also led to one of the most
interesting legal battles in the history of video games,
leading to the famed Tengen version of Tetris and
to the downfall of a few companies. It's a pretty cool
story, so let's get down to business. Hold on for a
second while I set the time machine to cruise control..

June 1985
Inspired by a pentominoes game he had bought earlier,
Alexey Pazhitnov creates Tetris on an Electronica
60 at the Moscow Academy of Science's Computer Center. It
is ported to the IBM PC by Vadim Gerasimov and starts
spreading around Moscow. Pazhitnov gets a small degree of
fame for his program.

July 1986
The PC version makes its way to Budapest, Hungary, where
it is ported to the Apple II and Commodore 64 by
Hungarian programmers. These versions catch the eye of
Robert Stein, president of the British software house
Andromeda. He plans to get the rights to the PC version
from Pazhitnov directly, and to get the other versions
from the Hungarian programmers. Even before Stein gets in
touch with Pazhitnov or the Academy, he sells all the
rights to Tetris (except for arcade and handheld
versions) to Mirrorsoft UK and its USA affiliate,
Spectrum Holobyte, owned by Robert Maxwell's Pergamon
Foundation.

November 1986
Stein wires a contract for the rights to Tetris to
the Academy. Although Pazhitnov would later say that he
did not mean to give a firm go-ahead to the deal, Stein
goes ahead and flies to Moscow to sign the contract. He
returns empty-handed; the Russians made up for their lack
of knowledge of the video game world with obstinance.
Stein makes a plan to essentially steal Tetris, to
claim it was invented by the Hungarian programmers.

Mirrorsoft Tetris, Atari ST version

Meanwhile, the IBM PC version of Tetris is
released by Spectrum Holobyte and Mirrorsoft, causing an
instant sensation not only as an obscenely addictive
game, but also as "the first game from behind the
iron curtain". The game is filled with graphics of
Russian themes (battles, Matthias Rust landing his Cessna
on Red Square, Yuri Gagarin's first space mission). Stein
still does not legally own any rights to Tetris.

June 1987
Stein presses for and finally gets a license giving him
the rights to make Tetris for the IBM PC and
compatibles "and any other computer system".
Now he owns the copyrights to Tetris, but he still
doesn't have a contract with the Russians.

January 1988Tetris is released for all home computers. It gets
glowing reviews and sells quickly in computer stores.
Stein's plan to "steal" the rights to Tetris
is foiled when the CBS Evening News interviews
Pazhitnov as the inventor of the game. A new company,
ELORG (Electronorgtechinca), takes over the negotiations
with Stein.

ELORG's director, Alexander Alexinko, realizes that
Stein is giving out rights he doesn't have and threatens
to cut off any deal. Stein, in turn, threatens to start
an international situation.

May 1988
After months of bickering, Stein signs a contract with
ELORG to make Tetris for computers. The contract
expressly forbids rights to arcade and handheld versions,
and any other mediums "which we did not dream about
yet". Meanwhile, Tetris has become the
top-selling computer game in England and the United
States.

July 1988
Stein meets with Alexinko in Paris to work out arcade
rights to Tetris. Alexinko has quite a different
agenda; he hasn't seen any money from Stein at all yet.
Meanwhile, Spectrum and Mirrorsoft are sub-licensing
their rights. Spectrum gives Bullet-Proof Software the
rights to make Tetris video and computer games in
Japan; at the same time, Mirrorsoft gives Atari Games the
exact same rights in Japan and North
America. The two companies start infighting.

Robert Maxwell, owner of both Mirrorsoft and Spectrum,
sides with Mirrorsoft on the matter. Atari starts plans
to release an arcade and NES game (under the Tengen
label). Bullet-Proof Software still has the computer
rights in Japan; BPS president Henk Rogers successfully
gets the rights to release a video-game version later in
the year. Tetris is released for the Famicom in
early November 1988; eventually, two million cartridges
would be sold.

BPS Tetris for Famicom

November 1988
The Game Boy is undergoing development. Nintendo of
America head Minoru Arakawa wants to make Tetris
the pack-in game; he enlists Henk Rogers to get the
handheld rights to Tetris for him. Rogers contacts
Stein but basically gets stonewalled by him, so Rogers
decides to fly to Moscow to get the rights himself.
Stein, sensing why Rogers asked for the rights, flies to
Moscow as well. Robert Maxwell's son, Kevin, also
decides to fly to Moscow to straighten out what is by now
a large-scale licensing mess. The three men fly into
Moscow at the exact same time.

February 21, 1989
Rogers gets to ELORG representative Evgeni Belikov first.
He impresses Alexey Pazhitnov and the Russians, and signs
a contract for the handheld rights to Tetris.
Afterward, Rogers shows off the Famicom version of Tetris
to the Russians. Belikov is shocked. He didn't give
Rogers the rights to make a console version! Rogers
explains that he got the rights from Tengen; Belikov has
never heard of Tengen! Rogers, trying to appease the
Russians, tells Belikov the part of the story Stein did
not tell him, and writes him a check for royalties on the
Tetris cartridges he has already sold, with
promises of more checks. He sees that he has a chance to
get all the console rights to Tetris, but knows
that the much larger Atari will fight him. Fortunately,
he has Nintendo on his side!

A reminder: Robert Stein's original agreement was only
for computer versions of Tetris. Any other rights he
gave out weren't his to sell.

Later, Stein makes it to ELORG. Belikov makes him sign
an alteration to the original contract defining computers
as "PC computers which consist of a processor,
monitor, disk drive(s), keyboard and operation
system". Stein misses this line defining computers;
he later realizes that it was all a big orchestration on
Rogers' part to get his rights from Stein. The next day,
he is told that, although he can't get the handheld
rights at the moment, he can get the arcade-game rights.
He signs the contract for them three days later.

February 22, 1989
Kevin Maxwell visits ELORG. Belikov takes out Rogers'
Famicom Tetris cart and asks him about it. Maxwell
was unaware that his own company gave some rights to
Atari Games until he reads Mirrorsoft's name on the
cartridge. Maxwell asserts that the cart is a pirated
copy, and returns to his agenda of getting the arcade and
handheld Tetris rights. He leaves with only the
right to bid on any rights remaining on Tetris.

The final scorecard: Kevin Maxwell walks off with a
piece of paper, Robert Stein with the arcade rights, and
ELORG with conclusive evidence, thanks to Maxwell's
assertion that any Famicom carts are pirates, that it
never sold the video game rights. If Maxwell wanted those
rights it would have to outbid Nintendo. Henk Rogers has
the handheld rights and tells Arakawa at NOA that the
console rights are up for grabs. BPS makes a deal to let
Nintendo make Tetris for Game Boy; a deal that was
ultimately worth between $5 and 10 million to BPS.

March 15, 1989
Henk Rogers returns to Moscow and makes a gigantic offer
for the console rights to Tetris on behalf of
Nintendo - an offer that, although undisclosed, was high
enough that Mirrorsoft did not try to match it. Arakawa
and NOA chief executive officer Howard Lincoln fly to the
USSR.

March 22, 1989
A contract for the home videogame rights is finalized
with Nintendo, which insists on a clause that the
Russians would come to America to testify in the legal
battle that would undoubtedly ensue after word of the
contract comes out. The advance cash for ELORG is
reported to be around $3 to 5 million. Belikov wires
Mirrorsoft saying that neither it, Andromeda, or Tengen
were authorized to distribute Tetris on video game
systems, and that those rights are now given to Nintendo.
The Nintendo and BPS executives have a party that night
in their Moscow hotel room.

March 31, 1989
Howard Lincoln gleefully faxes Atari Games a
cease-and-desist order to stop manufacturing any version
of Tetris for the NES. Both Atari and Robert
Maxwell become furious. Tengen responds to Nintendo on
April 7th that they completely own the rights to home
versions of Tetris.

April 13, 1989
Tengen files an application for a copyright of the
"audiovisual work, the underlying computer code and
the soundtrack" of Tetris for the NES. The
application does not mention Alexey Pazhitnov or
Nintendo's rights to the game.

Robert Maxwell, meanwhile, is using his vast media
empire to try to get Tetris back. He contacts both
the Soviet and British governments to intervene on the Tetris
matter. Infighting between the Communist party and ELORG
begins, and Maxwell gets a promise from no less than
Mikhail Gorbachev that he "should no longer worry
about the Japanese company".

In late April, Lincoln flies back to Moscow and learns
of ELORG's being put upon by the government. In the
middle of the night, he receives a call from NOA that
Tengen has sued Nintendo.

The next day, he starts interviewing Belikov,
Pazhitnov, and many others at ELORG, to make sure that
Nintendo's case for the Tetris home rights is
airtight. NOA immediately countersues Tengen, and
evidence begins to be gathered.

May 17, 1989
Tengen releases their version of Tetris with a
full-page ad in USA Today, despite the coming
legal battle.

June 1989
The court case between Tengen and Nintendo begins.

The battle mostly hinged on one matter: Was the
Nintendo Entertainment System a computer, under the
definition in the contract that Belikov made Stein sign,
or a video-game system? Atari argued that the NES was
meant to be a computer, due to its expansion port and the
existence of a computer network for the Famicom (short
for "Family Computer") in Japan. Nintendo's
argument was more to the point: the Russians at ELORG had
never had the intention of selling the video game rights
to Tetris; the definition of "computer"
in Stein's contract proved it.

June 15, 1989
A hearing is held about the injunctions Tengen and
Nintendo had given each other to cease manufacture and
sale of their respective versions of Tetris. Judge
Fern Smith decides that neither Mirrorsoft nor Spectrum
Holobyte had been granted the video game rights, so
therefore it could not have legally given those rights to
Tengen. Nintendo's injunction request is granted.

June 21, 1989
Tengen's version of Tetris is taken off the
shelves, and manufacture of the Tengen version is ceased.
Several hundred thousand copies of Tengen Tetris,
sitting in their boxes, lie in a warehouse.

July 1989
Nintendo's version of Tetris for the NES is
released. About three million are sold in the US. At the
same time, the Game Boy, with Tetris as the
pack-in, is being sold. America gets Tetrisized.

This ends the main history of Tetris; the
lawsuit between Nintendo and Atari would continue to drag
on and on and on (it was finally finished up by 1993).

Epilogue

Atari Games still released an arcade version of Tetris,
selling about twenty thousand units. Atari Games was
recently bought up by Williams/WMS; the fate of the
Tengen Tetris carts lying in warehouses is
unknown. In all likelihood they were bulldozed since
Tengen could not legally get rid of them any other way.
If the figures are to be believed, there are about one
hundred thousand Tengen Tetris cartridges floating
around; a less-than-average run by NES standards, but
still nowhere near an impossible cart to find.

Robert Stein made, in total, about $250,000 on Tetris.
He could have made a great deal more, of course, but
Stein had trouble getting Atari and Mirrorsoft to pay him
royalties for the (bogus) rights he sold them. Spectrum
Holobyte had to organize another deal with ELORG just to
hold on to the computer rights to Tetris.

Robert Maxwell's large-scale media organization
collapsed in the midst of the struggle, and Robert
Maxwell himself died suspiciously as questions rose about
whether he was entirely honest about his business
dealings. As a result, Mirrorsoft UK faded away as well.

The big winners of the whole affair were Henk Rogers,
president of BPS, and Nintendo themselves. How much did Tetris
make for Nintendo? That's difficult to answer,
considering that Tetris being the pack-in for the
Game Boy enticed customers to buy the Game Boy.. and from
there, buy other Game Boy carts. Bringing all this into
account, the figure can go up and up and up. About 30
million Game Boy Tetris carts have been made.

As for the Russians, no one made big money from Tetris
except for the Soviet government. As the USSR broke up,
the people at ELORG and the Academy scattered across the
country.

Alexey Pazhitnov made nearly no money from Tetris
itself. ELORG made, then cancelled a deal that would have
given him merchandising rights to Tetris. Still,
Pazhitnov was happy that the game he created became
famous world-wide, and he did get an 286-clone from the
Academy as a reward; he also had a much nicer apartment
than most of his colleagues. In 1996, with the financial
backing of Henk Rogers, he organized The Tetris Company
LLC, and is now finally getting royalties for his
creation.